Sahana Arun
1313244
II PSEng

CIA – 3

The cyclical nature of racism and sexism, as observed in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Georgia, USA. She seemingly kept up with the times, and took active part in current affairs. She was accidentally blinded by a gunshot wound when she was eight years of age, and then went on to lead a life of relative seclusion. She wrote constantly, and one of the major themes across all her work was the treatment of black women in America. Her writing was deeply influenced by what she, along with her family, experienced in terms of racism, in Southern USA.

During the course of the novel, we are privy to the inner workings of Celie’s mind, as she is the narrator and protagonist of the story. She is first introduced to us as a poor, uneducated fourteen year old girl, who took to writing letters to God, because she felt the need to talk to someone about how Alphonso, the man she believed to be her father, turned violent and raped her.

The novel is set in rural Georgia, the American South, where racism and sexism ran rampant. We see most of the characters in the novel as victims of the subjugation and obfuscation of their identities, on account of the fact that they were so heavily discriminated against because of the color of their skin, and in the case of the female characters, simply because they were women, that suffered an even worse plight, as they were both, female and black.

We see how, though they were uneducated, the characters themselves are fairly accepting of the fact that racism and sexism are, in fact, the stark realities of their lives. Case in point: Sofia engaged in conversation with Eleanor Jane and told her about how she was well aware of the inevitability of her son growing up to be a racist and sexist, largely because of the way they lived. She knew he would be exposed to that kind of mindset soon enough, and although she dreaded it, she did not delude herself into thinking that it would not happen. For example, even when Harpo beats Sofia, it is mostly because his father told him that it would make him less of a man if he did not do so, and that giving into Sofia’s resistances made him weak; because according to him, she was, after all, only a woman, and a woman’s only task was to be obedient of her spouse’s wishes. It is due to instances like this that we become aware of the fact that even the abusers are not entirely to blame, although their actions are reproachable, it was only under severe duress that they did the things that they did. That being said, it becomes then obvious to us that Walker’s characters are far from single dimensional, and that the dissection of their actions is the only way to really understand their motives.